Tuesday, 23 April 2013

What motivates your activism?

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So many of the conversations that take
place during Shake! planning and delivery engages with the discussion of what
our motivations for activism are? Is there a space for ‘feelings’? Should we be
motivated by love or anger? Do they even stand in opposition? If not, then how
do we find the balance?

“So often activism is based on what we
are

against, what we don’t like, what we
don’t

want. And yet we manifest what we focus

on. And so we are manifesting yet ever

more of what we don’t want, what we

don’t like, what we want to change.

So for me, activism is about a spiritual

practice as a way of life.

And I realized I didn’t climb the tree

because I was angry at the corporations

and the government; I climbed the tree

because when I fell in love with

the redwoods, I fell in love with the
world.

So it is my feeling of ‘connection’ that

drives me, instead of my anger and
feelings

of being disconnected.”

-Julia
Butterfly Hill

“Those
who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want
crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and
lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The
struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both.
But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never
did and it never will.”
―Frederick Douglass